Important Concepts

That was a lot of concepts to take in at once, but it should provide a solid set of fundamental understandings that will aid in understanding how electronic circuits work. As a quick review:

Positive and negative charges are arbitrarily named characteristics to describe the attractive and repulsive behavior of subatomic particles such as protons and electrons.

Atoms get their net “charge” as ions; when there is an imbalance between the number of positively charged protons and negatively charged electrons.

Materials that electrons move freely between atoms are electrically conductive.

Because of historic reasons, circuits are described with the concept of hole-flow, rather than electron flow, which states that charge carriers flow from positive to negative.

Electrons flow rather slowly, but their effect travels at the speed of light as an electromagnetic wave.

Electromagnetism is a three dimensional attraction and repulsion force that arises from the angular momentum of electrons, and a strong magnetic field can be generated from current going through a coiled wire.

A current can be induced in a wire when it passes through a magnetic field.